This poem beautifully
and poignantly encapsulates the idea that what we are is defined by our
language & how we, in trying to escape it’s net, slowly realise that the
threads wind round our very DNA, that the language we imbibe as babes in arms
forms the chemistry of our adult self and escape is not an option, at most all
we do is redefine.

Brian
Patten is a poet that has long been a…… No I won’t say long been a favourite,
but has long formed part of how I define myself as a lover of poetry.

He is one
of those poets that for a reason I cannot answer, just makes me shiver and
shiver at some elemental level.

I was a latecomer to his poetry, not really
discovering him until sometime in the early 1990s, through the anthology Collected Love Poems(first pub’ 1981) this book went all over Germany with me, became
a talisman that I carried from job to job, became a way for me to define a
stage of my life and a key to break free from it and move on to what would
prove to be my future.

And heart is daft

WITHOUT understanding any pain but that

which
inside her anyway is made,

this creature singled out creates

havoc with intelligence. And heart is daft,

is some crazy bird let loose and blind

that slaps against the night and has

never anywhere to go. And when a tongue’s

about to speak some nonsense like

“Love is weak, or blind, or both” then comes

this crazy bird, pecks at it like a worm.

(Collected love Poems)

This book was also one
of the very first books of poetry featured on this blog, way back in 2010 and I
stated that “This is a book full of
beautiful images, of wide eyed wonder with the sheer beauty, terror of the
collections subject matter.” .......

Grinning Jack (first pub’1990), is made up of poetry
spanning three decades of Brian Patten’s writing. The poems are drawn from and
replace a number of earlier collections - creating a companion volume to Love Poems. Thepoetry in Grinning Jack takes us on a journey from those childhood
moments in some playground, through the wonder and angst of adolescence and
ends with an adult lamenting the loss of close friends. This is a tale of
growing up, growing old and growing disillusioned, but it is also much more
than that, as Charles Causley once said of Patten
he;

"Reveals a sensibility profoundly aware of
the ever-present possibility of the magical and the miraculous, as well as of
the granite-hard realities. These are undiluted poems, beautifully calculated,
informed - even in their darkest moments - with courage and hope."

It is this
juxtaposition of the fantastic with the mundane reality of existence that runs
through his poetry, where one moment magic is revealed to be the prevalent
force inhabiting our world, and in the next for death to raise his macabre hand
reminding us that for all that is of wonder, the flipside is blood and guts,
the entrails that make up the stark reality, the apparent meaningless that life
sometimes demonstrates.

“When in public poetry should take off its
clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the
company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.
On sighting mathematicians it should unhook the algebra from their minds and
replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their
minds and replace it with algebra; it should fall in love with children and woo
them with fairy tales; it should wait on the landing for two years for its
mates to come home then go outside and find them all dead.

When the electricity fails it should wear dark glasses and pretend to be blind.
It should guide all those who are safe into the middle of busy roads and leave
them there. It should shout EVIL! EVIL! From the roof of all stock exchanges.
It should not pretend to be a clerk or librarian. It is the eventual sameness
of all contradictions. It should never weep until it is alone and only then
after it hascovered all the mirrors and sealed all the cracks.

Poetry should seek out couples and wander with
them into stables, neglected bedrooms and engineless cars for a final Good
Time. It should enter burning factories too late to save anyone. It should pay
no attention to its real name.

Poetry should be seen lying by the side of road
accidents, be heard hissing from unlit gas rings. It should write the teacher’s
secret on a blackboard, offer her a worm saying, inside this is a tiny apple.

Poetry should play hopscotch in the 6 pm streets
and look for jinks in other people’s dustbins. At dawn it should leave the
bedroom and catch the first bus home. It should be seen standing on the ledge
of a skyscraper, on a bridge with a brick tied around its heart. It is the
monster hiding in a child’s dark room, it is the scar on a beautiful man’s
face. It is the last blade of grass being picked from the city park.”

I believe he achieved
this and more through his words. He is a poet that has meant a lot to me, has
become one of a small selection of poets that define how I see poetry, has
become, I guess, a signifier pointing a way for me to define my relationship
with the world/word, and as stated above – we may not escape the language
imbibed whilst young, but we can find means of redefining our relationship to
it, and to me personally this writer, was one of my means.

Brian Patten was born
in 1946 in Liverpool, and grew up in a working class neighbourhood, now long
demolished. He left school at fifteen, becoming a junior reporter on The Bootle
Times, where he wrote a popular music column. One of his first pieces included
a report about McGough and Henri. At sixteen he edited and produced the
magazine underdog, which gave a platform to the underground poets in Liverpool
at that time, and which went on to print the work of international poets such
as Allen Ginsberg and Andrei Voznesensky.

He made his name in the 1960s as one
of the Liverpool Poets, alongside Adrian Henri and Roger McGough. Their main
aim was to make poetry immediate and accessible for their audience, and their
joint anthology, The Mersey Sound (1967), has been credited as the most
significant anthology of the twentieth century for its success in bringing
poetry to new audiences, and is now a Penguin Modern Classic.

His first solo
collection was Little Johnny's Confessions 1967, published when he was
twenty-one years old. Since then he has published numerous collections,
including Vanishing Trick (1976) Armada (1996), which includes some of his most
striking poems, focusing on the death of his mother and his memories of
childhood. Penguin publish his Selected Poems and Harper Perennial one of his
most important books, The Collected Love Poems. Brian Patten's poems have since
been translated into many European languages.